Quote:Most of the people doing it are in Russia and there is no jurisdiction....the US government can not touch them, and the Russian legal system has nothing in place to make it illegal. Even if you track down the emanating IP address, they can't do anything about it.

Everything Eddie says here is absolutely true. I wondered for a long time how these crooks could hold you up for an extortion payment in exchange for returning control of your computer. The fact is, that even within Russia, Latvia, and the other places they do business they are constantly changing financial institutions so if someone did want to go after them civilally as oppossed to criminially it is hard to do even that.

One journalist interviewed a list of people who were scammed into paying money, and out of several hundred people that he talked to who used a credit card online to pay the scammers, not one reported the incident to their credit card company. Since they could have challenged the charges as well as taken steps to cancel their cards (they did after all just turn their credit card number, expiration date, and security code over to obvious crooks)it seemed odd to the journalist that they had not reported the fraud to their credit card company. Most of them said that they did not want to admit that they had been so stupid has to fall for the scam.

Cookies are stored on your computer. When you visit a site that has a cookie, all the cookie does is remembers any account information you had to set up for that site. The cookie itself is not dangerous and they never have been. The history again is just a browser tool to say you typing. It doesn't "reach out" to anything. Cookies are NOT malicious in any way. Yet the media says so.

The reason you would delete anything like that is to speed your browsing up. If you have 10,000 sites in your history, you make your computer look through 10,000 lines asking "Do I have this? Do I have this? DO I have this?" There is some convenience to the browser remembering but there is a point of diminishing returns.

All your really need to do is download Malwarebytes and let it run. It will block any malicious attempts to reach you, and yes, there are port scanners running that are looking at your computer 24/7. Whether they get IN or not is another story, but some robot port scanner program somewhere is scanning every IP looking for open ports they can exploit. I used to do this when I was young. I know very well how it works. Thus I know how to stop it. And Malwarebytes is the best real time tool right now. Super AntiSpyware is the best "as you run it" tool right now. I still run Norton in the background too. Never had a virus.

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Why does the Department of DEFENSE want a weapon with first strike capability? Wouldn't that be the Department of Offense?

Well one good thing about a fake antivirus infection is at least it will pop up and you know you are infected (unless of course you know virtually nothing about computers)

I think that anyone who does online banking in their general surfing computer is asking for trouble. I have a windows 7 partition that is used for that only, means I have to reboot to bank but I think a little bit of inconvenience to stay much safer.

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